Death by freezing

Uttar Pradesh tells a similar story, with life paralysed in pockets like Gorakhpur, Deoria, and Kushinagar. Again, the death toll is estimated to be well over 200.

But there is a bigger story here than just temperature readings. It appears that the icy fingers of death seem to search for those who are already on the edge, not just in terms of adverse living conditions but with respect to their physical well-being.

The high cold wave death toll, therefore, points to widespread and persistent hunger and malnutrition. Only last week, people from 11 states that have witnessed hunger deaths spoke about their experiences of living with hunger at a public hearing in Delhi. It needed a Nobel laureate and the world’s best-known authority on famines — Amartya Sen — to diagnose the problem: command over food is intrinsically related to the capacity to generate income, whether in terms of access to land or sustained employment.

It also appears that while the country has made great strides in terms of its operational ability to produce food, it has failed to make food available to those who are most desperately in need of it, despite impressive food stocks; food subsidies amounting to an estimated Rs 300,000 crore; a plethora of state interventions ranging from the Sampoorna Grameen Rozgar Yojana to the various Food for Work programmes, and a concerned Supreme Court which has issued several judicial directives on this score.

Food is the fuel of life and it is a cliche well worth repeating that a nation of sickly and weak people cannot get ahead. Food deficits translate into diets being deficient of everything, including the basic carbohydrates and proteins that provide energy. Both the Central and state governments, quite obviously then, need to be much more effective about ensuring the food security of its citizens. They need to ask themselves how many people are hungry and how hungry are they.

Most of all, they need to know who requires the food most urgently. This, of course, is difficult business given the huge numbers involved — according to some estimates, nearly half of the world’s hungry live in India, and some 35 per cent of the country’s population are considered food-insecure. But there can be no escaping the task. The havoc wrought by the grim reaper this winter only underlines the urgency.